I wrangle the Unreal Engine daily as part of my job and it is one fine piece of technology. That said I am profoundly skeptical as to ray tracing. I’ve been in computer graphics for a while and every couple of years, like clockwork, at SIGGRAPH or somewhere like that, somebody shows off real-time raytracing (which involves a lot of perfectly reflective spheres for some reason) and we’re all jolly impressed and then nobody ever does anyhing about it because even if we do get the supercomputers they’ve used to do it (and if you look at realtime raytracing demos from back in the day, we totally do thanks to modern graphics cards) we’ll inevitably use them to render non-raytraced graphics at a higher quality level and real-time raytracing, again, requires $150 000 in expensive hardware and a industrial-grade PSU.
Stuff like the DXR support they’ve just put into DirectX 12 is going to have its uses in adding that little bit extra to some scenes, but I have the gravest doubts that it’ll significantly displace the old ways of doing things until someone invents a way of doing it cheaply.
